Coverage based inter cluster communication for load balancing in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Effective energy management in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks is more challenging issue compared to homogeneous wireless sensor networks. Much of the existing research focuses on homogeneous wireless sensor networks. The energy conservation schemes for the homogeneous wireless sensor networks do not perform efficiently when applied to heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. The proposed algorithm in this paper exploits the redundancy properties of the wireless sensor networks and also changes the inter cluster communication pattern depending on the energy condition of the high energy nodes during the life cycle of the heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. Performance studies indicate that the proposed algorithm effectively solves the problem of load balancing across the network and is more energy efficient compared to multi hop versions of the standard low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy protocol.